{"id":19314,"date":"2026-02-24T22:32:02","date_gmt":"2026-02-24T22:32:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/scalise-committee-chairs-huddle-with-white-house-officials-on-gop-agenda\/"},"modified":"2026-02-24T22:32:02","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T22:32:02","slug":"scalise-committee-chairs-huddle-with-white-house-officials-on-gop-agenda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/scalise-committee-chairs-huddle-with-white-house-officials-on-gop-agenda\/","title":{"rendered":"Scalise, committee chairs huddle with White House officials on GOP agenda"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>House Majority Leader Steve Scalise held a dinner Monday night with Republican committee chairs and senior White House officials to discuss the GOP legislative agenda ahead of the midterms, according to five people granted anonymity to share details of the private event.<\/p>\n<p>White House deputy chief of staff for legislative affairs James Blair was in attendance at the dinner, held at a Capitol Hill restaurant, alongside the administration\u2019s legislative affairs director James Braid and top House liaison, Jeff Freeland, according to the people.<\/p>\n<p>Blair and White House officials discussed key affordability policy areas they feel are especially salient in a midterm election year, including housing. They also raised health care and economic issues \u2014 topics Trump plans to hit on in his State of the Union address Tuesday night.<\/p>\n<p>But notably, the people with knowledge of the meeting said the group did not discuss pursuing these priorities through another party-line budget reconciliation package.<\/p>\n<p>Scalise said in an interview Tuesday afternoon he organized the dinner to coordinate with the White House and invited the chairs to share details of the legislation they plan to work on for the rest of the year.<\/p>\n<p>White House officials also gave a rough overview of what to expect from Trump\u2019s State of the Union speech, Scalise continued.<\/p>\n<p>Blair and other White House representatives said the president will laud American greatness ahead of the country\u2019s upcoming 250th birthday, according to Scalise. Trump will also talk about \u201cthe mess he inherited from Biden,\u201d including high inflation and rampant illegal border crossings.<\/p>\n<p>Trump will give examples of how he\u2019s working with his Republican majority in Congress to fix a lot of those problems, but \u201calso make clear that the work\u2019s not done,\u201d Scalise said. <\/p>\n<p>He added that Trump&#8217;s speech also will preview \u201cwhat we need to do in the next few months\u201d ahead of the midterms.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>House Majority Leader Steve Scalise held a dinner Monday night with Republican committee chairs and senior White House officials to discuss the GOP legislative agenda ahead of the midterms, according to five people granted anonymity to share details of the private event. White House deputy chief of staff for legislative affairs James Blair was in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}